The fall of koli, p.16
The Fall of Koli, page 16
At least, we could do that if she was finished fixing the dagnostic. But when we asked Lorraine how that work was going, she never give us honest answer. All she would say was that Ursala was working hard, or that some place called Rome took more than one day to build it. And when we asked if we could go see Ursala our own selves, she said she wouldn’t hear of such a thing. “She’ll never finish if you keep interrupting her, Koli. You tend to your work and let her tend to hers.” And our work, it seemed, was being with Stanley all the time we was awake.
One time, when we was walking from some place to some other place, Stanley stopped dead in the middle of the hallway, like he was in a forest and the sun had just come out. He looked at the floor, then at Lorraine, his face all shocked and wildered.
Lorraine smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I knew you’d feel it as soon as we started to manoeuvre. I wasn’t going to mention it – out of some superstition, I suppose. But yes, it’s finally happening. We’re rounding Cornwall now, and bearing north. Our ETA is oh-seven-twenty tomorrow.” Then she turned and walked on.
This was a day when Stanley was mostly talking to us like we was people instead of shit on his shoe, so I walked up alongside him and asked him – in a low voice so Lorraine couldn’t hear – what all of that meant.
“It means we just started turning,” Stanley muttered, putting out his hand to touch the metal wall of the hallway we was in. “Didn’t you feel it?”
“Are we going somewhere then?” Cup asked him.
He turned on her, filled with rage that come on him of a sudden and filled him brim-full.
“What do you fucking think? Yes, we’re going somewhere. We’re going home, you pair of yokels.”
He speeded up to get away from us. We was happy to let him, for it give us a moment to talk alone.
“I guess that’s a good thing then,” Cup said. “At least if their home is any place in Ingland. If they take us back to land, one half of our problem is gone.”
“Why are they doing it though? They been out here a long, long time, from what they said. What’s changed?”
“I think you know the answer to that one, little dumpling,” Monono said.
And she was right. The thing that had changed was us. Something had sent Sword of Albion out here into the deep ocean in the first place, and kept it here all this time. But now we was come – or rather Ursala was come, with her dagnostic – and what she was going to do had made the great big boat turn itself around and head for land. That was not a thing I liked to think about.
“We’ve got to make our move,” I said to the both of them. “There’s nothing else for it.”
Cup cut her hand sideways through the air. She’d started to learn Franker after we come to Many Fishes village, and this was the Franker sign for no. “We can’t go nowhere before Ursala has finished her work. She won’t come with us until she’s good and ready.”
“That could be any time though. And we can’t wait till she tells us, because we don’t ever get to talk to her. We got to do it and hope she’s ready.”
“You’ll need to get rid of the drones,” Monono said. “Otherwise the Banners can track you in real time.”
“I got an idea for that. Well, half of an idea anyway. Cup, slip me the door-opening thing. If I can do it, I’ll come to your room tonight and we’ll go from there.”
“Don’t get yourself killed on the way though,” Cup said.
I told her I would do my best.
24
After we went to our beds that night, I lay awake a long time waiting for the ship to go quiet. It was not like a house, where the wood settles as it cools with a deal of creaking and snapping. There wasn’t no wood here, except for broke bits of furniture. But Sword of Albion hummed to itself, and the humming changed as the day got late.
I had told my idea to Monono and she liked it. She said it was clever enough that she might have to stop calling me dopey boy.
“What’s dopey then? Does dopey mean stupid? Have you been throwing insults on me all this time?”
“Little bit.”
“Well then, when we’re out of this, we got to have words between us. If you got such disrespect for me, I don’t think we can be friends.”
“Koli-bou, are you teasing me?”
“Little bit.”
“Uwa sugoi! The disciple has become the master!”
It might sound strange that we was making jokes, but I was only doing it so as to hide how scared I was. As for Monono, I think she knowed well enough how I was feeling and was helping me along.
When I thought it had got to be late enough at last, I slipped out of my bed. The lights lit up as soon as I moved, and I put my boots back on in a big hurry. The brightness made me feel like eyes was watching me. All the rest of my clothes I had kept on, so now I was ready. I turned and faced the door.
“Be brave, Koli-bou,” Monono whispered in my ear.
I didn’t feel brave at all, but it was good she said it. Whenever she talked to me on the induction field, it felt like she was as close to me as my own skin. I needed that closeness right then.
I took the opener from out of my pocket and pressed it into the middle of my palm, where I had seen Lorraine carrying it. It stuck there by its own self like it was glued to me. I was scared it might be stuck to me for aye and ever, but when I picked at the edge with my thumbnail it come away at once. I guess it was just made that way, to stay where it was put as long as was needful.
I put out my hand towards the door, but I stopped short before I touched it. “Monono, what if you was right about the cameras? What if they’re watching us right now?”
“Then we lost before we started, dopey boy. But there’d have to be someone monitoring the cameras too. And they’d have to think you were worth the trouble. Let’s hope they underestimated us.”
I touched the opener to the handle of the door, and I heard a click, loud enough to make me flinch. But Sword of Albion was so big, I told myself there wasn’t no way anyone would be close enough to hear. I tried the door and it opened. The hallway outside was dark as pitch, but in the little square piece of light that shined through the doorway I seen the silver drone sitting there in the air, watching and waiting. It turned its red eye on me, not quick, but smooth and deadly.
I lifted up the DreamSleeve in my hand.
“Perimeter,” Monono said. But she said it in Paul Banner’s voice.
For a half of a heartbeat, it seemed like it wasn’t going to work. Then the drone wheeled round again and shot away down the hallway. I lost sight of it in the dark before it had gone ten steps, but it was going at a fast lick and it didn’t seem like it would stop any time soon.
This was what I had asked Monono about after we decided we’d try our luck that night. I knowed she could remember voices and make them sound out again. She had done it with Sword of Albion’s signal when we was back in Calder, and at Many Fishes she had made me and Cup laugh by borrowing the voice of Rain Without Clouds, who was the Healer there. I was hoping when the drones heard Paul Banner’s voice they would do what they was told to, and I was proved right.
I stepped out into the hallway, and the lights come on – not the whole way along, but just in the part that I was in. The light moved with me as I walked from my own room to Cup’s, coming up bright as day in front of me and fading back to midnight blackness again behind me. It was like one of them days when there’s heavy cloud all over but the sun breaks through in just the one place and comes down like a spear. Hunters in deep woods have been killed by such a thing, when the trees waked right next to them, and though I needed to see my way I was not happy to be picked out so clear.
I had tried to remember the way from my own room to Cup’s, but I wasn’t sure I had got it right until I turned a corner and seen the yellow drone standing right in front of her door. Monono said “Perimeter” again and off it went. I knocked on the door, then I pressed the opener to it with one hand and shoved with the other. The door swung open all the way with just that one push.
Cup was on the other side of it. She had a knife in her hand, lifted up to chest height and with her other hand open behind it to drive it in hard. I stepped back with a yelp like a whipped puppy. “Cup, it’s me!”
“I know it’s you,” she said, lowering her hands. “But I thought I heard Paul’s voice just now.”
“It was Monono borrowing his voice. That was a part of my plan.” I looked down. “Where’d you get the knife though?”
“Breakfast table,” Cup said. “They got so many there, they didn’t miss this one. It didn’t have any kind of an edge to it when I took it, but I done the best I could, sharpening it on the side of a rusted pipe. I guess it’ll do if it comes to it. It’s better than empty hands anyway.”
“Come on,” I said. “We got a lot to do and not much time to do it in.”
The ruined hallways and broke-up rooms of Sword of Albion was very different in the full dark than they was when we walked them by day. They didn’t stay dark for long though, for we brung the light with us wherever we went. And my trick of remembering worked. Ever and again, I catched sight of something I knowed and had give a name to, so though I got lost oftentimes I still could find my way again a little bit further on. Remembering what Cup had said about empty hands, I picked up a piece of pipe in one of the rooms. It was cold and heavy and solid. I didn’t know whether I meant to throw it or hit out with it, but I felt better for having it.
I was in a sweat the whole of this time, thinking that Paul or Lorraine would come on us out of the dark, or a flock of drones flying as quiet as bats, with their red eyes winking as they sighted on us and spit out fire.
Nothing like that happened. By and by, we come to the shaking room, and I touched the opener to the plate that was on the wall there. It worked yet again. The door broke in two parts and let us in.
We didn’t have no idea how to make the shaking room go up or down, but Monono told us how to do it. “The buttons on the wall there, Koli-bou. They’re numbered. The deck has got to be zero. Zero is the one that looks like a duck’s egg.”
I looked for the duck’s egg, but didn’t find it right away.
“In the middle,” Monono said. “Put out your finger and count with me from the bottom. One – two – three – four – five – six – seven – eight – nine rows up. Wow. Whatever they’ve got down below decks, it must be big.”
I was going to push the duck-egg button as soon as I found it, but that count and them words on top of it give me pause. They made me think of the message that was left in my room. You’ve got to see what’s down below.
“It’s that one,” Cup said. She pointed, then she pressed on the button her own self. The room gun to shake, which meant we was going down. I kept on thinking about the message. Not the words of it, for I couldn’t read the words, but the spiky zig-zag lines lying every which way across the paper like they just spilled right out of someone’s head and landed there. There was something hid in them jagged lines – something of fear and hurt – that I couldn’t put out of my mind.
Sword is ready.
Don’t let them reach land.
The doors of the shaking room opened. It was all dark out there, but I knowed we was come to the deck because there was stars and a sickle moon. Cup stepped out, then looked round at me when I didn’t follow.
“Come on, Koli.”
“I’m going down further,” I told her. “I want to see what’s under the decks.”
“What? We’re looking for lifeboats, ain’t we? They’re not like to be down in the cellar.”
“But what are they keeping in all that big space?” I said. “We got to see.”
“Why?”
“Because the message said to.”
Cup throwed out her hands. “The message said not to trust Stanley too, and then he give us the opener. We don’t need to listen to the damn message. We’re meant to be finding a way off this boat.”
“I know, but I don’t want to go before we find out what’s going on here.”
“Who cares what’s being done? As long as it’s not being done to us, I’m fine with it!”
I tried to come up with some words to say that would convince her, but I didn’t even know myself why I thought it was important. Before I knowed what I was doing, I hit one of the buttons that was under the zero. As the doors closed, Cup jumped back inside.
“You don’t got to come,” I told her.
She punched me hard in the shoulder. She was really angry. “Of course I got to come. If we split up, we’ll never find each other again. But this is a waste of time, and we don’t have no time to waste!”
“It can’t hurt to find out what’s down there,” Monono said.
“Yeah, it can! Dead god damn it, am I the only one here that’s got a brain inside their head?”
The room shaked for the space of maybe ten breaths. Then it come to a stop with a great deal of creaking and scraping. The doors opened. On the other side of them there was nothing but black, thick and solid like a curtain. There was not a single sound, and the air didn’t move.
The thought of stepping out into that dark made my legs feel weak and watery, but Cup was rightly furious that I had brung us down here without her say-so. I felt like it had got to be me that went out first.
“Nothing’s stirring out there,” Monono said. “I think you’re safe.”
That give me just about enough heart to move. I took one step, and then another. I went as soft as I could, but the floor was metal plates and my feet as they come down raised a great clatter of echoes that run out into the dark and then back to me. I knowed from how long the echoes lasted that the space in front of me was a lot bigger than any other room on the ship. It might even be bigger than Senlas’s cave back in Calder, where more than a hundred people made their home.
I was about to take a third step when the lights come on.
So many lights.
The black was turned to staring, dazzling white. I cried out and throwed my hands up in front of my eyes, for I was half-blinded. I still didn’t see no further than my nose: the brightness hid what was in front of us just as well as the dark had done.
When she heard me yell, Cup come out at a dead run with her knife in her hand. She come so fast, she run up against a metal rail and almost tipped herself over it. It was well she didn’t. As our eyes got used to the light, we seen the drop that was there. It was twenty feet or more down to the floor. If she had gone over, she most likely would of broke her back in the fall. The walls was metal, sheer and smooth. The floor was metal with lines and grooves stamped into it. There was a heavy smell in the air, of grease and dust and sourness.
Down at the bottom, right under us, there was great dark shapes ranged in lines like pieces in the stone-game before you make your first move. They was not game pieces though, or anything like. As our eyes got used to the light, we seen that they was drudges. Hundreds and hundreds of drudges, all standing shoulder to shoulder like people that was come to the gather-ground to hear the Ramparts make a speech.
“Dandrake’s balls!” Cup gasped. She backed away from the rail until her shoulders was up against the doors of the shaking room. Which was now closed on us.
I lifted up the opener to set it against the silver plate next to the doors. There wasn’t no silver plate there. I set it against the doors instead, but that didn’t do nothing at all. My hands was shaking so bad it made a tap-tap-tap sound against the metal.
“Koli,” Cup whispered. There was a shake in her voice too. “Get us out of here.”
“I can’t,” I said. I tried the opener again. “It’s not working.”
“Don’t panic,” Monono said. “Not yet anyway. I already told you, nothing’s moving. Those things down there are asleep.”
“They’re not like to stay that way for long,” Cup hissed. “They got to know we’re here. We already made too much noise.”
“Yes, you did,” Monono said. “So shush now. Just listen.”
We listened. Except for our own ragged breaths, there was no sound in all that enormous room.
“What are them things doing down there?” Cup growled. “Did they move yet?”
“Not an inch,” Monono said. “And I’m not reading any sound or movement elsewhere in this hangar. I’ve got big ears, Cup. If anyone was creeping up on you, I’d hear them coming.”
Cup relaxed a little. Not enough to tuck her knife back in her belt, but enough to unfold herself from off the wall and look around.
“We can’t get out,” she said. “You got us stuck down here, Koli.” But then the both of us saw that we was not all the way stuck. There was steps going down from the end of the platform into the bigger place below us – the place where the drudges was all standing.
“Maybe we can get out that way,” I said.
Cup kind of exploded at me. “By going down even further?” When the echoes of her voice come booming and clattering back to us, she tensed and hunkered down and muttered a curse, low enough that it didn’t have no echoes.
“I think we got to try,” I said.
“I’m gonna play the stone-game with your dead-god-damned head once we’re out of this,” Cup said. But she went ahead of me to the steps, and down them, knife out and ready. She knowed how much use I was in a fight, which was not much, and she was protecting me even though she sweared at me for my foolishness.
I sweared at my own self too, in case you’re wondering. Instead of finding a way off the ship, I had digged us deeper into it. I wished more than anything that I hadn’t ever touched that button.
We come down to where the drudges all was. We didn’t go among them, but still they was standing in long lines right in front of us. The sour grease smell was stronger down here, so it hit the back of your throat when you breathed and you could taste it when you swallowed.
